Eleanor Roosevelt Quotes

New Hampshire is one of the birthplaces of American freedom and independence - a place with a love and a passion for liberty.

How I longed to see these things; how I longed to see the Liberty Bell and walk on the streets where Thomas Jefferson, Tom Paine and Benjamin Franklin had walked.

If the Christians who were alive in the 1770s behaved and believed like the Christians of today, there wouldn't be an America as we know it.

When the American spirit was in its youth, the language of America was different: Liberty, sir, was the primary object.

The founding fathers used the well regulated militias to suppress rebellions.

Resolved, That these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States, that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain is, and ought to be, totally dissolved

If the American Revolution had produced nothing but the Declaration of Independence, it would have been worthwhile.

All honor to Jefferson—the man who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence by a single people, had the coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document an abstract truth applicable to all men and all times, and so to embalm it there that to-day and in all coming days it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling-block to the harbingers of reappearing tyranny and oppression.

The Declaration of Independence promised citizens equal access to economic opportunity. This was the powerful principle for which men were willing to fight the American Revolution, but it was never codified in law. When the Founding Fathers wrote the Constitution, they assumed that the country's vast resources would ensure equality of opportunity.

Quite naturally, the men who led in stirring up the revolt against Great Britain and in keeping the fighting temper of the Revolutionists at the proper heat were the boldest and most radical thinkers - men like Samuel Adams, Thomas Paine, Patrick Henry, and Thomas Jefferson.

Who would think it possible to redirect historical scholarship by explaining what Thomas Jefferson said in the Declaration of Independence?

The thing to remember about the Declaration of Independence and the profession of freedom is that it was written by people who were quite free and who were surrounded by people who were not free. The people who wrote the Declaration of Independence were ventriloquists really. The obsession with freedom makes no sense when it applies to them.

Books are for adults; revolution is for the young.

The true history of the American Revolution can never be written… A great many if the people in those days were not at all what they seemed, nor what they were generally believed to be.

I don’t think that we have kept pace with the changing economy and we have not kept pace particularly with young people.

I consider Paine our greatest political thinker…. We never had a sounder intelligence in this Republic. He was the equal of Washington in making American liberty possible. Where Washington performed Paine devised and wrote. The deeds of one in the world were matched by the deeds of the other with his pen.

The movement from slavery to freedom is also a movement from security to insecurity of maintenance.

Join or Die

Had they taken a poll in Philadelphia in 1776, [the founders] would have scrapped the whole idea of independence. A third of the country was for it, a third of the country was against it, and the remaining third, in the old human way, was waiting to see who came out on top.

Not enough people really think about the founding of our country, how it all began and what its really about. They don't even teach it in schools any more.

The Founders were anything but demigods to themselves and their contemporaries, who recognized full well that the experiment in self-government had only begun.

It was by one Union that we achieved our independence and liberties, and by it alone can they be maintained.

When Washington visited Portsmouth in 1789, he was not much impressed by the architecture of the little town that had stood by him so stoutly in the struggle for independence.

America is a country born from semi-mythologized blood, glory and acts of selfless patriotic sacrifice.

Democracy is not the end point of mankind. There may be developments in many different directions in the coming centuries. Democracy has only existed for about 200 years. It started out with the American Declaration of Independence. The Americans got their ideas from the Europeans, in the main from the French, the Dutch and the British.